Pros:

Cons:

Primordia isn't simply an old-school adventure - at times, it's a *specific* old-school adventure: 1992's Beneath A Steel Sky. Their premises are different, but the shared vibe is unmistakable, from an engineer type being pulled from the wasteland to a corrupt city with his wise-talking robot pal, to a few bits and pieces in spoiler country. The deja-joue dial goes all the way to 11 if you've played publisher Wadjet Eye's Blackwell adventures. The robot buddy in this one is called Crispin, and he's voiced by actor Abe Goldfarb -- the same actor who gave voice to Blackwell's sidekick, Joey Mallone.

Offering Joey-squared is hardly a strike against Primordia though, especially as Beneath A Steel Sky's hero/sidekick relationship was by far its best element and Crispin and protagonist Horatio do a fine job living up to it. Crispin especially is that rarest of creations, a genuinely funny, likable comic relief character. He's sarcastic without being snide, snarks without being mean, and does it all with enough wit that it makes total sense that the largely humorless Horatio would happily keep him around for companionship instead of merely tolerating his presence.

Wasteland Souls

Crispin also serves as Primordia's main way of breathing life into its relentlessly muddy, post-apocalyptic world. Sometimes he helps directly, sometimes he comments on the scene, sometimes he acts as the game's hint system, and sometimes he just comes out with wisdom like "I'm pretty sure that 'explosives' and 'helpful' are synonyms, boss."

Your robot sidekick is evidently a Jay-Z fan.

These conversations are a bright spot in a game whose heavy lifting needed to be done by its story and puzzles.

Other times, Crispin demands that, just once, Horatio force another robot to figure out how to talk to him instead of MacGuyvering up a special communications device. He's always fun though, giving the otherwise often bleak locations a sense of life, and jokes to distract while poking around.

The catch is that as well as this works, these conversations are a bright spot in a game whose heavy lifting needed to be done by its story and puzzles. In both areas, Primordia stumbles early on and never quite regains its footing.

The Edge of Civilization

Without getting into spoiler-heavy specifics, the plot's core problem is one of drive. Horatio's initial goal is to find a replacement power source for his ship, and that's fine - more than enough for the first half of the story, spent exploring the radioactive dunes and ultimately figuring out he needs to get to Metropol, robot city of glass and light, where nothing ever, ever, ever goes wrong.

Metropol, city of gas and light and brown. So much brown.

Primordia assumes an emotional connection to Metropol that it never actually earns.

While there are many more characters to add a refreshing shot of energy to things in Metropol, the story becomes jumbled. The city setting brings a tale of intrigue and conspiracies and the future of Metropol, but it's all instantly torpedoed by a lack of reason to care. Primordia assumes an emotional connection to the city that it never actually earns, making its attempts to raise the stakes feel hollow.

If this is a robot expression, it reads, "I don't care."

Not only did it feel like someone else's job to care, most of what I'd seen felt it was too late to change anything important anyway.

Even by the end, with all the questions answered, I felt neither any personal animosity towards the villain behind Metropol's many problems, nor had any real interest in its future. Not only did it feel like someone else's job to care, most of what I'd seen felt it was too late to change anything important anyway.

To call on the obvious comparisons, Machinarium not only presented a far more interesting robot city, but gave its nameless hero a direct place in it. Back in Beneath A Steel Sky, Foster had the big over-arching question of why he'd been abducted, and the more direct goal of escaping. They're not the only ways to use this kind of setting, but they're good examples of it being used properly. Here, Horatio just wants to get his stuff back and leave. For drama's sake, he needs to be personally engaged throughout. Instead, he's mildly inconvenienced.

Spare Parts

Few of the puzzles stand out as particularly tricky or tough to solve, or satisfying for that matter, though they do fit the mood - scavenging components, reassembling them, and repairing old systems. The first half of the game, set in the wasteland, is very slow-paced and reliant on object hunts. Crispin and Horatio's chatter keeps things lively, but there aren't too many screens to search, and nothing takes too long to track down.

Is that a clue, or are you just using robot humor to mess with me?

In Metropol proper, the tone switches to focus on dealing with other robots.

In Metropol proper, the tone switches to focus on dealing with other robots by making trades, sorting out problems, and exploring both above and below the streets. Again, nothing is desperately difficult. There are more characters to push you in the right direction, which helps, and the sheer contrast from the empty wasteland help the small number of screens and robots feel like part of a busier world. It's only with a couple of puzzles that things really drag out, including the hunt for a special code, and another couple of very easily missed items.

Robot Revolution

Too often though, both puzzles in the wasteland and the city get dragged down by some basic annoyances - the biggest by far being pixel hunting without any real idea of what you're looking for. Still, some of that is to be expected. There are also a couple of nasty red herrings, one of them spectacularly mean when you find out that the correct solution involves taking a bizarre logical leap to make it work.

Sorry, Crispin. I'm just trying to avoid the pop-up interfaces.

Tedious, unskippable word puzzles are all the worse for thinking that they're being remotely clever.

The most baffling problems involve the pop-up interfaces you often have to use. They're badly designed and a real nuisance to use - a failed attempt at retro charm that mistakes harking back to simpler times for just outright making something crap.

The nadir is a series of tedious, unskippable word puzzles that are all the worse for thinking that they're being remotely clever. Most aren't a challenge of any kind though, just irritating. By far the worst offender is Horatio's PDA, with a display that can't even fit in a tweet. Primordia is a low-res game, but not *that* low res. I dread to think what its world's pagers look like.

Pointing Without Quite Clicking

Primordia isn't a bad adventure, just not one with the spark of other recent attempts - not least Wadjet Eye's own library. The basic ideas are solid, and it's worth checking out at least the demo for the humor that the Horatio/Crispin dialogue brings.

It lacks the emotional resonance to actually mean much though, or the puzzles to really satisfy. Play it for an evening or two of adventuring and it'll make you smile, but don't expect to remember it in a month, or even the next time you start feeling nostalgic for time spent beneath another steel sky.

Far from the scrapheap, but not a diamond in the rough either, it seems. In the wake of Gemini Rue's atmosphere, Resonance's indie ambition and the Blackwell series' humanity, even Primordia's humour and writing can't stop its retro charms feeling a little too tired to keep up the pace.